On the Sussexes’ cries for help to the Royal Family
‘I thought my family would help, but every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, just got met with total silence, total neglect. We spent four years trying to make it work. We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job. But Meghan was struggling.’
On Harry’s family ‘stopping’ them from quitting
‘That feeling of being trapped within the family, there was no option to leave. Eventually when I made that decision for my family, I was still told, “You can’t do this”, And it’s like, “Well how bad does it have to get until I am allowed to do this?”. She [Meghan] was going to end her life. It shouldn’t have to get to that.’
On Meghan’s wish to ‘end her life’
‘Meghan decided to share with me the suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life.
‘The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum and to now to be put in a position of losing another woman in my life — with a baby inside of her, our baby.
‘The scariest thing for her was her clarity of thought. She hadn’t “lost it.” She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t self-medicating, be it through pills or through alcohol. She was absolutely sober. She was completely sane’.
On Prince Charles’ parenting
‘My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I, ‘Well it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you’,’ Prince Harry says in the new documentary.
‘That doesn’t make sense. Just because you suffered doesn’t mean that your kids have to suffer, in fact quite the opposite.
‘If you suffered, do everything you can to make sure that whatever negative experiences you had, that you can make it right for your kids’.
On ‘smears’ from ‘The Firm’
‘Before the Oprah interview had aired, because of the combined efforts of The Firm and the media to smear her, I was woken up in the middle of the night to her crying into her pillow because she doesn’t want to wake me up because I’m already carrying too much. That’s heartbreaking.’
And trying to repair the relationship
‘I like to think that we were able to speak truths in the most compassionate way possible, therefore leaving an opening for reconciliation and healing’
On Meghan helping Harry into therapy
‘I saw GPs. I saw doctors. I saw therapists. I saw alternative therapists. I saw all sorts of people, but it was meeting and being with Meghan I knew that if I didn’t do the therapy and fix myself that I was going to lose this woman who I could see spending the rest of my life with.
‘When she said, “I think you need to see someone,” it was in reaction to an argument that we had. And in that argument not knowing about it, I reverted back to 12-year-old Harry.’
On his mother’s funeral
‘When my mum was taken away from me at the age of 12, just before my 13th birthday, I didn’t want the [royal] life. Sharing the grief of my mother’s death with the world,’ he said.
‘For me, the thing I remember the most was the sound of the horses’ hooves going along the pavement. Along the Mall, the Red Brick Road. By this point I was, both of us were in shock. It was like I was outside of my body and just walking along doing what was expected of me.
‘Showing one tenth of the emotion that everybody else was showing. I thought, “This is my mum. You never even met her”.
Using booze and drugs to cope with his mother’s death
‘I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling.’
The royal said he would drink a week’s worth of alcohol on a Friday or Saturday night ‘not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something’.
On quitting the Royal Family
‘Making this move was really scary. At every possible opportunity the forces working against us tried to make it impossible. Did I expect to find ourselves in this situation so quickly? No. I think we’ve done a really good job.
‘I have no regrets. It’s really sad but I have no regrets at all because now I’m at a place where I think I should have been four years ago…
‘Now we’ve got a beautiful little boy who keeps us busy, keeps us running around, he makes us laugh every day. We’ve got two dogs. And another little baby girl on the way. I never dreamt that.
‘I have no doubt my Mum would be incredibly proud of me. I’m living the life that she wanted to live for herself. Living the life that she wanted us to be able to live.
‘Not only do I know that she’s incredibly proud of me, but that she’s helped me get here. And I’ve never felt her presence more than I have over the last year. I wish she could have met Meghan. I wish she was around for Archie.’
On dealing with his anger and anxiety
‘I can’t remember the first time it happened, I can just remember the feeling, anxiety, like a hollow empty feeling almost of nervousness, is it fear? Everything feels tense.
‘It’s being the hunted, and being helpless and knowing that you can’t do anything about it. There is no escape. There is no way out of this.’
‘Wherever I could I wanted to understand more about what was going on and why my nervous system was reacting the way that it was.
‘I quickly established that if this relationship was going to work then I was going to have to deal with my past, because there was anger there, and it wasn’t anger at her, it was just anger, and she recognised it, she saw it.
‘Well, so how do I fix this? And it was a case of needing to go back to the past, go back to the point of trauma, deal with it, process it, and then move forward.
‘Having now done therapy for four and bit years, five years now, for me it’s all about prevention.
‘That doesn’t mean we have to speak to them every single day, but to have someone that can help guide us and create that awareness in our own life to when we might be feeling pain and how to get out of that and what the tools are available to us on any given day to make sure that it doesn’t snowball into something bigger’.